Charles Dickens: Two books by Claire Tomalin and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, reviews

Frances Wilson applauds contrasting accounts of Charles Dickens’s
restless, energetic life: Charles DIckens: A Life by Claire Tomalin, and
Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

By Frances Wilson

11:43AM BST 24 Oct 2011

These two tales of Dickens might be seen as the spirits of biography past and biography yet to come. In Charles Dickens: a Life, Claire Tomalin gives us a cradle-to-grave – or rather blacking-factory-to-burial-in-Westminster-Abbey – Life of the 19th-century’s busiest novelist In his original and elegant Becoming Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst gives a twist to the genre by focusing on the 1830s, the decade that saw Dickens achieve international fame “before he needed to start shaving”.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

While Tomalin explores, with her accustomed care and empathy, who Dickens was, Douglas-Fairhurst asks who else he might have been. What potential selves did the young man murder when he chose to be a novelist rather than an actor, a clerk, a stage-manager or a journalist?

Episodes covered by Tomalin in a single sentence – such as the suicide of Dickens’s first collaborator – are treated by Douglas-Fairhurst as scenes central to his life.

Both authors focus on the novels, but Douglas-Fairhurst, who has every line ever written by Dickens at his fingertips, inhabits them; he shows us the internal process of the writing, revealing the hidden jokes, the coded messages, the ways in which “the most central and eccentric literary figure of the age” wove his other selves into his texts.

But in order to appreciate the intricacy and richness of Douglas-Fairhurst’s micro-approach, it is necessary to have the full story as Tomalin tells it, and taken together both books do justice to a man who described himself as a divided character, the best of men and the worst of men.

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Tomalin’s brisk, sharp prose keeps pace with the restlessness and energy of her subject, Dickens’s need to live several lives at once. Not for him the peace and stillness sought by other writers.

“I am here, there, everywhere, and (principally) nowhere,” Dickens said. “Whatever it is, it is always driving me and I cannot help it.”

A peripatetic figure, when he wasn’t moving his vast family from house to house across London or transporting them on European holidays in truck-sized coaches, he could be found covering 12 miles on his daily walk (“if I couldn’t walk fast and far I would just explode and perish”).

He was otherwise editing newspapers, writing journals, agitating on public issues, housing fallen women, putting on theatricals, consorting with his many friends, and writing, writing, writing, his books appearing in episodes, like soap operas, so he was unable to look back or revise the story.

In his mid-thirties he appointed his friend John Forster to be his biographer and it was to Forster that Dickens confided the secret that, aged 11, he had worked in a blacking factory while his feckless father had been imprisoned for debt. “The poor have no childhood,” Dickens once wrote. “It must be bought and paid for.”

Dickens was the people’s writer: his wealth came not from the sale of expensive editions at inflated prices; it was instead, as a contemporary put it, the result of “thousands and thousands of individuals, putting down their shillings month after month in exchange for another 32 pages of tightly packed letterpress”.

A lover of theatre, he would read dramatised versions of his work to vast, spellbound, public audiences. It was during these readings, Dickens said, when he reduced grown men to sobs, that he felt “what a thing it was to have Power”.

Forty-five, according to Joseph Conrad, is the most reckless age in a man’s life, and when Dickens reached this milestone – by which point he had written 11 novels and looked, he admitted, “like an old man” – his life broke in half. Packing his bags, he left his wife and 10 children, taking as housekeeper his adoring sister-in-law, Georgina.

“You want to avert your eyes from a good deal of what happened during 1858,” Tomalin writes, unblinkingly fixing her gaze on the wretched events.

Twenty years of pregnancies now at an end, Catherine Dickens was discarded, only one of her children taking her side. Dickens, it seems, lived backwards: going to work before he went to school, he was a dutiful husband before becoming a wayward bachelor.

His obsession with the young actress Nelly Ternan, who now became the focus of his life, was the subject of Tomalin’s earlier award-winning study The Invisible Woman (1990) and now, returning to the mysterious relationship between the author and the actress, she confirms her belief that in 1862 the affair produced a child who then died.

When Dickens died of a stroke aged 58, all evidence of his relationship with Ternan was destroyed.

Dickens is a boyish 27 when Douglas-Fairhurst says goodbye to him, and anything is possible.

He is yet to bring into the language more than 200 new words and phrases, including the first uses of “fairy story”, “footlights”, “melodramatically”, “messiness”, “seediness”, “spectacularly” and “whoosh” – which taken together tell the story of his life.